Secession , FSL 1850, Breach of Contact and the Compact Theory

jgoodguy

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On a different thread @cash posted about a number of secession documents blaming the dastardly Yankees not returning slaves as forcing the Secessionists to secede.

Continuing the idea.
The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States - Civil War Trust

South Carolina

In the state of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.

Texas

The States… by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article [the Fugitive Slave Clause] of the federal constitution, and laws passed in pursuance thereof; thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate the amity between the members of the confederacy and to secure the rights of the slave-holding States in their domestic institutions-- a provision founded in justice and wisdom, and without the enforcement of which the compact fails to accomplish the object of its creation.

Avalon Project - Confederate States of America : Documents
Mississippi
It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.

IMHO I do not understand this. SCOTUS had made personal liberty laws subordinate to the Federal Slave Laws. Prigg v Pennsylvania, Ableman v. Booth. There is Lemmon v. New York with Taney looking to make to make slavery national, by blocking state laws freeing slaves. It appears that in 1860, outside of the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, the slave owners are winning.

In addition the laws were not strictly enforced Prigg was not the only one to openly attack the Personal Liberty Laws. Many of these laws were ignored by officials of the law and judges.
Also Cyclopædia of Political Science, Political Economy, and the Political History of the United States

So what is underlying this?

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: Symbolic Gesture or Gesture or Rational Guarantee? Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
Third, these very same scholars, however, virtually dismiss the problem of runaway slaves. The number of runaways -- perhaps a thousand per year -- seems too small relative to a total slave population reaching nearly four million by 1860 to have made much difference. As Peter Geyl (1961, p. 198) asks, "were a few hundred fugitive slaves worth the risk of getting enmeshed in a destructive Civil War?"

... We are thus left with the paradox of slaveholders insisting upon a measure that was simultaneously unnecessary and counter-productive....

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel offers 2 possibilities, one financial and one political. For this thread, I will follow the political.

Ibid
Equally important, we show that the fugitive slave act held important consequences for long-term coalition politics within the nation...We show that the act was part of a continuing and realistic effort by Southerners to maintain a secure home for the peculiar institution within a nation at best indifferent to slavery...Southerners thus faced significant uncertainty about the future in passing the Compromise of 1850: would their northern coalition partners vote to admit a slave state at a future date? Put in coalitional terms, did the Compromise of 1850 signal the reemergence of normal coalitional politics of the past two decades that allowed some pro-southern measures to be passed?
... The willingness of sufficient Northerners to support the fugitive slave act thus provided Southerners with critical information about the future of national politics and hence about the future security of slavery in the nation.
 
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